Saturday, August 11, 2012

American Stories

As Beasts of the Southern Wild was
starting, the people behind us suddenly broke into a flurry of anxious
whispering, as they realized this wasn’t The
Dark Knight Rises (I guess the poster on the way in must have been obscured
by the big bag of popcorn). They left in a hurry, but the incident was rather
useful in provoking a train of thought on the disparity in contemporary
American myth-making. The one that gets all the attention and the financial
love, of course, is the Batman movie – an enormous corporate investment,
knowingly packaged and positioned to provoke an audience frenzy, violently asserting
its seriousness by drawing on prevailing insecurities, sure enough of its
impregnability that it need acknowledge the opening-night mass murder in
Colorado merely by delaying the box office results and canceling a few parties
(gestures so cynically flimsy that they seem to me morally much inferior to
just doing nothing). If there’s any meaningful engagement in there with modern
anxieties and needs, it’s limited to what’s handed down from the manipulative
gods at the top of a cold, calculating mountain; audiences can flatter
themselves they’re in the presence of a cultural phenomenon, but they might as
well kneel down in front of MacDonald’s.

Beasts of the Southern
Wild

As a counterpoint,
Beasts of the Southern Wild is the
most intimate of fantasies. Even as you’re watching it, you can feel the
filmmakers crafting and refining it; it deliberately resists the potentially limiting,
closed-end perfection of a fully “polished” film. The director Benh Zeitlin is
from New York, but has lived in New Orleans for several years, and as a recent
article in Film Comment put it, set
out to make a film that resembled “a massive community art project.” At the
centre of this community he put a 6-year-old girl called Hushpuppy, living with
her drunken, disengaged father Wink in a fringe community called “the Bathtub.”
A storm rises up, seemingly prompted by the dislodging of the polar ice caps,
and the water level rises cataclysmically, causing the residents to be
evacuated to a government facility (a “fish tank without water” as she
describes it); their desire to reclaim their home intertwines with the advance
of several massive hog-like beasts, long-frozen and dormant.

Even that synopsis
tells you that the film draws heavily on memories of Hurricane Katrina and the
well-documented disruptions and injustices that followed, while consciously
busting through the parameters of quasi-documentary, or even normally-grounded
fiction. In that same article, Zeitlin said: “The movie is sort of pushing past
realism all the time into this hyper-real place or this fantasy place, but
because all the pieces are so organically found and every element is built so
organically, I think it sort of keeps it in realism in this way that is really
important, so that it doesn’t drift away from what people can relate to.” The
breathless nature of that statement, with its two sort-ofs, alerts you to the
project’s earnestness and potential over-preciousness. But I think Zeitlin’s
sense of the work’s internal rhythms and proportions is keen enough that he
avoids most potential pitfalls.

Makes me feel cohesive

The film is
crammed with odd, memorable fragments: the initial depiction of Hushpuppy’s
life, imagining her dead mother’s voice emanating from her clothes, which
remain strewn around the house, and concocting a terrible-looking meal out of
soup and cat food, lighting the stove with a blow torch; her and Wink’s boat,
built out of found elements prominently including the back-end of a trailer; a
later memory of the mother – as recalled by Wink - as a woman so steaming hot
that she could boil water just by walking past it (duly visualized, in the
literal way of a young girl’s imagination); an encounter with a sea captain who
subsists on chicken biscuits and has kept all the wrappers (“The smell makes me
feel cohesive”) and any number of proud, defiant images of the little girl, who
in the latter stages acquires a like-minded posse. The connective material
between these is sometimes rather murky, and you can feel the relative poverty
of means, like trying to cover up cracks in the fabric with mud and smoke. But
in this case, it enhances the film’s authenticity as personal testimony; the
“imperfections” in the wider imagining reflect the limits of the protagonists’
understanding and capacity for action.

In this vein, Hushpuppy’s voice-over narration perhaps relies
too much on bromides about how “the entire universe depends on everything
fitting together just right,” versions of which are repeated more times than I
tried counting, and which provide the film’s final note – a proud assertion of
one’s inviolable place in the cosmos, whatever the obstacles. Put another way,
the film, for all of its oddities, has a distinct overlap with the “triumph of
the human spirit” tales that crop up throughout American cinema.

Clichés
of cinema

The problem with this aspect of it, perhaps, is that it
doesn’t pay sufficient attention to the institutions and forces that make it so
tough for the human spirit in the first place. The movie clearly has a
political undertone – it presents the levee as a structure that protects the
monied interests lying on the other side, and the flip side of the Bathtub
community’s internal camaraderie and coherence is that it seems to be free of
any external intervention; one would hesitate to characterize the people as
beasts running wild, but the title forces it on us as a point of reference,
until the catastrophe strikes and the wheels of disaster control start turning
(because of course, in the delirious official morality, it’s fine if people
live in poverty and deprivation, but a moral affront if they perish in
something that looks dramatic on TV). And by the way, although Hushpuppy and
her father are black, that’s not true of the entire community: the issue is one
of class, environment and opportunity, not simply race.

Writing on Deadspin.com, Tim Grierson said that
although he likes the film, it’s a “model of the worst clichés of contemporary
art-house cinema” – in his words, it fetishizes “authenticity,” it tries way
too hard to be gritty, it treats poverty as something noble, it confuses simple
characters for memorable ones, and it touches on real-life events without
saying anything about them. Unfortunately, Grierson’s articulation of these
points is so poor that it’s hard even to allow a token acknowledgment that one
can see what he means. The same website’s review of The Dark Knight Rises gushed: “It is a powerful, riveting action
movie, full of dread and weight and pain and looming apocalypse. It is an
amazing accomplishment to have created this whole dark, sad universe and turned
it into an insanely popular franchise.” Well, maybe that’s amazing, or maybe it
just embodies the worst clichés of mainstream perception, how we’re meant to be
more interested in someone else’s overblown dark, sad universe than in trying
to engage with our own.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).